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I still miss UML class diagrams being widely understood. At the peak of its popularity, you could go into a room with just about _any_ programmer, draw boxes an

I still miss UML class diagrams being widely understood. At the peak of its popularity, you could go into a room with just about _any_ programmer, draw boxes and arrows on the whiteboard and everybody understood. People knew which arrow was composition, which was inheritance, which way the dependencies flowed etc. UML pictures made it easy to design modular software - just make sure all the arrows point in roughly the same direction and you're set. When the UML scene began all this "enterprise architect" MDA bullcrap, as this article elegantly describes, it got thrown out en masse. Rightfully so, but with the bathwater we also lost this industry-wide capability to draw software. Text is great, and in parallel with UML's demise, the industry got amazing at succinct technical writing: the README.md in a github repo. But sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words and I still miss it.

asp_hornet 4y ago
This is my sentiment exactly. Now in it’s place we have bespoke diagrams where the meaning of lines, arrows and their directions vary from person to person and you need to ask the author to explain their convention before you can understand the diagram without assumptions.
zozbot234 4y ago
At its core, MDA is just the notion that UML (or some other graphical notation, for that matter) should be able to express Domain Specific Languages (DSL's). It's not clear that conversion from a high-level model to a platform-specific one should be a standardization concern, and maybe that's the "enterprise craziness" part that ultimately failed. But rigorously defined DSL's are not crazy; if anything, they're the only kind of "low code" that makes any sense at all.
ayewo 4y ago
> Text is great, and in parallel with UML's demise, the industry got amazing at succinct technical writing: the README.md in a github repo. But sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words and I still miss it. I think the decline in UML started with the decline of Waterfall as more teams adopted Agile. To state it more generally, more teams adopted ways of working that had shorter feedback cycles (relative to Waterfall) and unfortunately UML diagrams get in the way of that since they are not testable or easily made into prototypes [1] that can be shown to the customer for quick feedback. 1: That didn't stop people from trying. Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems readily comes to mind https://sparxsystems.com/ https://sparxsystems.com/
andylynch 4y ago
A former colleague of mine held an opinion which I still strongly agree with, that the most productive use of these diagrams was during conversation, on a whiteboard. ( https://www.websequencediagrams.com/ https://www.websequencediagrams.com/ is the next best thing)
- skrebbel 4y ago
  Yep, exactly that. The moment people tried to run pictures is when it all broke down.

asp_hornet 4y ago

This is my sentiment exactly. Now in it’s place we have bespoke diagrams where the meaning of lines, arrows and their directions vary from person to person and you need to ask the author to explain their convention before you can understand the diagram without assumptions.

zozbot234 4y ago

At its core, MDA is just the notion that UML (or some other graphical notation, for that matter) should be able to express Domain Specific Languages (DSL's). It's not clear that conversion from a high-level model to a platform-specific one should be a standardization concern, and maybe that's the "enterprise craziness" part that ultimately failed. But rigorously defined DSL's are not crazy; if anything, they're the only kind of "low code" that makes any sense at all.

ayewo 4y ago

> Text is great, and in parallel with UML's demise, the industry got amazing at succinct technical writing: the README.md in a github repo. But sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words and I still miss it. I think the decline in UML started with the decline of Waterfall as more teams adopted Agile. To state it more generally, more teams adopted ways of working that had shorter feedback cycles (relative to Waterfall) and unfortunately UML diagrams get in the way of that since they are not testable or easily made into prototypes [1] that can be shown to the customer for quick feedback. 1: That didn't stop people from trying. Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems readily comes to mind https://sparxsystems.com/ https://sparxsystems.com/

andylynch 4y ago

A former colleague of mine held an opinion which I still strongly agree with, that the most productive use of these diagrams was during conversation, on a whiteboard. ( https://www.websequencediagrams.com/ https://www.websequencediagrams.com/ is the next best thing)

skrebbel 4y ago
Yep, exactly that. The moment people tried to run pictures is when it all broke down.